[Beowulf] Thought that this might be of interest

[Mark Hahn]

>> Have they moved to FlexLM yet ?   We had PathScale on eval for a while but
>> found that their bespoke license daemon hung onto a users license for a long
>> while after they'd finished compiling whereas the Intel compilers just
>> worked..
>
> This is a policy issue, and has nothing to do with moving to
> FlexLM. And it's discussed in the documentation.
>
> The policy is that once a user has a license, they have it for 15
> minutes. If you need more licenses, buy more licenses. If you need
> more eval licenses, just ask.

I agree with Pathscale on this.  we evaluated Pathscale about 2 years ago,
and were rather apalled at the license-hold time (which was substantially
longer at the time.)  the reason I think 15 minutes is reasonable is that 
the value of the compiler+support does not reduce as computers speed up,
making the compiler run faster.  I would WAG that most compilations
(of a single source file) run in <100 ms - probably 50x faster than a few 
year ago.

Pathscale's license-hold time was previously much longer - even it made some
sense, since for a set of full-time sw developers, it was a reasonable
and more flexible way of approximating a per-seat license.  our environment
is academic HPC, in which compilation is much more bursty, and for which 
15 minutes is really quite appropriate if you goal is to pay something that 
approximates the marginal utility of the license.  obviously, there are 
alternatives ranging down to zero cost.  we have had 20 Pathscale licenses
(for ~11 clusters, 1400 total users, 7k opteron cores) for a bit over a year 
and are satisfied.

regards, mark hahn.